Ganga Hospital: Building Culture

The case traces the roots of culture at Ganga Hospital, a trauma care centre in Coimbatore, an industrial hub in South India. The hospital was founded by an anaesthetist with his resourceful wife. Their sons trained overseas with legends in plastic and orthopaedic surgery and returned home. Given the triad of specialties within the family, trauma care emerged as a focus for the hospital. As directors and expert surgeons, the brothers established a core team, and carefully built a sustaining culture at the hospital. Culture emerges in a hospital setting from the attitudes of employees towards each other, their shared values, and governance structures. This culture impacts patient safety and outcomes. The case begins by contrasting the transactional principal-agent model of culture with that of pro-organizational stewardship. The RBV framework helps administrators who wish to make their staff valuable and inimitable. The case provides examples of stewardship by the directors of Ganga Hospital as well as its senior leadership. A few tenets form the threads of shared thinking at Ganga: a spirit of Ubuntu, collective patient ownership, a healthy hierarchy based on mentorship, delegated decision making, and so on. In the natural progression of the hospital, Ganga has gone beyond its focus on clinical excellence to establish academic and research pillars. This has helped the hospital nurture its homegrown talent, as well as train doctors in the streams of anaesthesia, plastic, and orthopaedic surgery, the triad of disciplines constituting trauma care.